James O’Keefe Sits Down With Rush Limbaugh

The below is an excerpt from The Limbaugh Letter, March 2018 issue:

RUSH: How did you decide that you wanted to use your format, for lack of a better word, the secret investigation, disguising your reporters and yourself and exposing various organizations? Because there’s nobody else doing what you’re doing. It’s very hard, James, to come up with something nobody else is doing in a country this populated that’s been around this long. How did you craft this particular philosophy of dealing with journalism?

O’KEEFE: I think, Rush, it became a new discipline. I never intended it to get this far. I’ve done a lot of introspection to figure that question out, and the answer is, we do undercover work. We do use deception as a means to gain access to people, and we’ve been attacked for that. By the way, I don’t think the attacks are really about the techniques. It’s all about what side you’re perceived to be on, and the consequences of your work.

But what created the discipline was the fact that the real deception is passing along information to the news consumer that’s not true — for economic reasons, political reasons, or maybe to not rock the boat. Noam Chomsky, no right-winger, said the media is propaganda due to various market forces. He wrote that many major media corporations wouldn’t report on Hillary Clinton for fear that she would regulate them. Her FCC would take away their broadcast license.

Where is the virtue in passing along untrue information to the masses when a source tells you something on the record? When politicians say things to you on the record, it’s probably false. They’re not giving you the truth. So it was a desire to pull back the curtain and go into their private, unguarded moments when they are being honest with you, and to compare what they say in private versus what they say in public. They say, “That’s unethical.” I say it’s far more ethical to do that than it is to lie to the American people.

The most important virtue in journalism should be telling the truth to your audience. So we believe it’s justified to use this deception with one person, in order to tell the truth to 100 million people.

RUSH: Let’s list some of your successes. You have exposed momentous wrongdoing at Planned Parenthood. You have exposed incredible lying and disinformation from ACORN, the community organizing group connected to President Obama. You’ve done the same thing with teachers’ unions. You’ve been able to infiltrate the DNC and get them to admit their real actions and motivations. You’ve taken on National Public Radio, CNN, The Washington Post, and this latest on Twitter. Of all these, do any stand out in terms of successful missions?

O’KEEFE: The one exposing the DNC and Democracy Partners.

RUSH: Robert Creamer and that bunch?

O’KEEFE: Yes, Bob Creamer and Scott Foval. That was extraordinary, because Bob Creamer was one of Barack Obama’s closest allies and community organizers. This young woman, Allison Maass, is mentioned in the book, and it reads like a John Grisham novel, following her along as she pretends to be the niece of a donor. She gets into his office, and they’re describing how the money is funneled from Hillary to the dnc to Democracy Partners to the Foval Group to execute the expletive on the ground. That’s to say, to foment violence at Trump rallies. She even meets with the “bird-doggers,” as they’re called, who incite this violence.

She’s 22 years old, and she’s been burned twice before, this woman with enormous courage. She’s like a young Nellie Bly, infiltrating and exposing and unmasking the most powerful people in the world. Rush, she was even invited to the Obama White House while undercover. We couldn’t go because we would be breaking the law using a fake name. But she was invited to meet withthe President — that’s how effective an undercover reporter she was.

RUSH: This was big. Robert Creamer was the guy Obama met with frequently in the White House. It was Creamer who was hiring the rent-a-mobsters to disrupt Trump rallies. He was hiring them via ads, and he was paying them. They even got a rally called off in Chicago. We wouldn’t know this if it weren’t for your organization. We would only have had the usual suspicions, but you got in there with this reporter you’re talking about. This was huge. It totally upset them for a long time. There were utter denials, but it was a masterful bit of work to expose these people. Are they still operating, though, even after your exposés? Is Creamer still doing what he’s always been doing? Are they still hiring rent-a-mobs, or have they slunk under a new rock?

O’KEEFE: I get asked all the time, “Why aren’t these organizations decimated? Why won’t the fraud go away?” I don’t know. I would say he’s probably doing it less. He’s under so much scrutiny. He’s sued us in federal court. I had to go to federal court with Allison two weeks ago in Washington, and it’s entering the discovery phase of this trial.

He’s suing us for breach of fiduciary duty, even though we didn’t sign a nondisclosure agreement. We did our jobs and we did them well as undercover reporters. We broke no laws. We just built trust, and we did it in the old-fashioned way.

But to answer your question, I’ll just say this: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. That’s true as applied to campaigns whether you’re working in the Democratic or the Republican Party. It’s true in journalism. These organizations aren’t going away. The fraud’s not going away. You have to keep exposing it. You have to keep uprooting it, unmasking it over and over again, until people are deterred from committing the fraud.